Mike Miles doesn’t think children need recess. As a military man, he thinks recess is a waste of time. But he backed down to parent pressure to allow recess. Great to have an authoritarian superintent who makes all decisions (not). Satisfying to see that at least once, he listened to parents.
Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles announced on Tuesday that he is changing the recess schedule at schools under the New Education System to allow for more unstructured play time for kids in response to a push from parents.
All students in pre-K through fifth grade classrooms in the 85 NES and NES-aligned schools will now have a single 30-minute recess period each day, according to the district, an increase compared to a former schedule that included two shorter breaks for the lower grades and no recess in fifth grade.
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“Teachers shared that they believe these modifications will limit lost learning time and maximize high-quality instruction, and we’ve heard from many families that they value unstructured free play time for their students,” Miles said in a statement. “We were able to make these changes without sacrificing high-quality instruction time and we believe this will enhance the environment in our schools and support student achievement.”
The change marks a big win for an HISD parent advocacy group called Free Play Houston, whose members have written letters, met with administrators and orchestrated an email campaign in recent weeks in an effort to push for more recess time for NES students, pointing out that shortening recess time may stand in violation of state law and HISD board policies.
“We are overjoyed that a child’s right to play will be respected and valued this school year,” the organization said in a statement on Tuesday, thanking those who emailed HISD leadership about the issue. “Houstonians have long known that all children need an unstructured play time during their school day. Decades of research shows that recess not only promotes social and emotional skills that become fundamental learning tools, but that recess also benefits students by improving their memory, attention, and concentration.”
Before these changes, the latest version of the NES master schedule allowed for one 15-minute recess in the morning and one 15-minute break in the afternoon for kindergarden through fourth grade students, with no additional time built in for getting students to and from the playground, according to Brooke Longoria, co-founder of Free Play Houston and an HISD parent.
Additionally, the former schedule included no recess for fifth grade students, with district administrators saying their physical movement needs would be met through Dyad programming like martial arts, dance and spin bikes, along with PE class.
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The modification appears to be the first time the new state-appointed superintendent has responded to community pushback by changing course.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In good news, a long time Democratic operation/news source, now called American Independent, appears to have seen the light about the necessity of promoting public schools.
In bad news, the new right wing news program of Sinclair broadcasting, the National Desk, promotes school choice.
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Sinclair takes every opportunity to undermine trust in public education. They constantly run their ‘Crisis in the Classroom’ feature repeatedly where they invite parents to voice their complaints or concerns about public schools. The so-called National Desk is unbridled right wing propaganda designed to bash public schools.
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If the kids are, forced to, sit in class from first to seventh period, then, their learning would not be, as productive, and, the children can’t sit still, for the 50-minute classes, seven whole periods at a time, think about it, can the adults sit, for 350 minutes straight, without moving around, and, only allow a, thirty minute, lunch? If the adults can’t even do it, then, how can we, ask the children to? These adults are, just WAY too far away, from their, childhood, schooling years, to know what works and, doesn’t.
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They also have no training in child development that would help people like Miles to understand the need for and benefit of gross motor activities, particularly in the younger grades.
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Deformers know so little that they think they know it all. One has but to look at the very top of the Deformer hierarchy for the model found throughout the ranks: Bill Gates. Totally ignorant about what makes people tick and how learning works but thinks he knows it all and has no clue, no clue whatsoever, how much damage he is done. A jerk and a creep.
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The Billionaire Boys and Girls Club is a group of supervillains. They have no clue about how anything works, and they buy politicians along with whatever else they want. Tech billionaires are the worst billionaires and should not be billionaires. I noticed Laurene Powell-Jobs listed as a member of a group of mobster-style criminal charlatans looking to build what, in my estimation, looks like not just a charter school but a whole charter city in California that will, “generate tax revenue for schools and be entirely funded by private sector money. (Sounds like a for-profit charter school, huh!)
Thompson said the company’s actions had raised food and national security concerns. He’s asked the U.S. Air Force, the Treasury Department, the Defense Department and the FBI to investigate the land purchases. Thompson met with representatives from the company, including Sramek, according to KGO.
‘And I don’t think they had a clear understanding of the significance of livestock in Solano County,’ Thompson said. ‘And it was my impression that they kind of pooh-poohed the agricultural value of the land.'”
They kind of pooh-pooh the value of students and teachers too, huh!
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-31/residents-politicians-learn-land-grab-solano-county-tech-billionaires
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LCT, they buy what they want.
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When my daughter opted to try public school in third grade they had a combined 30 minute lunch and recess period. That 30 minutes included the time to get to the cafeteria and go through the line, as well as the time to line up at the end. When she returned to public school in junior high she had no recess at all – students had to remain in their seats in the cafeteria until the passing period to return to class. Now that she’s in high school even the supervision period which used to be a schoolwork/downtime period after lunch is now a social-emotional learning class.
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I feel one of those “when I was a kid” moments coming on. Our days were not micromanaged by a bunch of suits that had no business anywhere near our schools. It wasn’t always blissful, but no one was trying to make us college and career ready in elementary school. We were kids, not someone’s data points. High school was soon enough to introduce college and career concerns, which were not really noticeable until we neared the end of our high school years. Businesses didn’t expect fully trained employees when they hired the next group of newbies. They trained us! If we were “lucky” enough to have college in our futures, then we got to layer on education that might lead us to a professional career down the road (again on-the-job training was the norm). I see no upside to the hypervigilance that has been introduced into childhood.
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Lots and lots and lots of downside
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“We were kids, not someone’s data points.”
Yep! Comte-Sponville on using others for one’s own gain:
“To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Comte-Sponville [my additions] From “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues”.
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Speduktr,
You reminded me of one of Arne Duncan’s best lines.
He visited a NYC elementary school and said, “I want to look in the eyes of second graders and know that they are thinking about college.” Made me wonder.
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I’m afraid to know, but what does a “social-emotional learning” class in high school entail?
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I don’t know about HS, but when my 2nd was still in public school (MS) and was taking Alg I, the teacher implemented SEL into her classroom. Dittos of Growth Mindset and Grit….garbage! I basically told her not to give my kid that crap and to just teach him Alg if she wanted him to pass the stupid state test. I found those dittoes last year while cleaning out a closet…..I kept them in case I needed them for proof but then decided to just put him into private HS. So I would say that SEL class in HS would be something similar….except with more talking about it.
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Good morning Diane and everyone,
A school district near me recently decided to cut out recess to give students a study hall. And they’re reducing lunch to 20 minutes. The absurdity continues. My husband has complained for years that students AND teachers don’t get a proper time for lunch. There have been many years he’s eaten lunch at 9 am. This is why whenever “wellness” and the importance of “mental health” are discussed in schools, I just tune it out. It’s a farce. They whole institution is completely unhealthy.
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It’s a farce. They whole institution is completely unhealthy.
Yup
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And we wonder why parents want vouchers!!! (?). We wonder why Private and Charter schools are filling up and home school co-ops are cropping up everywhere? Parents know that their children are unhappy and it’s “the system” that is making them that way. Until the stupid tests go away (along with its evil twin the Common Bore curriculum) things will never change!
I found this site a long time ago when my kids were still in elementary school (no recess!…test prep for our Title 1 school) . I knew things weren’t right in their public school and this site gave me the answers. Both of my kids are now out of HS and this same conversation is still on going. When will this nightmare end?
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When will this nightmare end? Good question. It’s breathtaking how uninformed the general public and our journalists and policy makers, including many district-level leaders, are about basic matters like the ways in which the puerile standards bullet list deforms curricula and makes it incoherent and what makes the mandated standardized tests invalid and reliance on those into pseudoscience.
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LisaM.
To answer your question: Whenever the teachers refuse to participate in the standards and testing malpractice regime. . . sadly though. . . that won’t happen. “The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
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“Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to starve before we are hungry.”
Thoreau’s Walden
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23.5 Today, it’s supposed to be typical for people to be isolated in their nuclear family dwellings. Here’s the way it’s supposed to go: after college, the middle-class American couple “buys” a house. That terms suggests that they become its owners. Typically, no. This is as good a time as any to discuss the scam played on everyone else by the very wealthy that is referred to as money. Here’s how the banking system and money work: The government issues to some wealthy person or persons a charter to run a bank. This gives the bank the right to make loans. So, you go to a bank, fill out a mountain of paperwork, the bank does a thorough investigation to ensure that you are a good do-bee prole, and grants you a mortgage loan. Let’s say that that loan is for $300,000. The bank doesn’t actually HAVE that $300,000 dollars that it has loaned you. The federal requirement is that it must have 10 percent of that on deposit. In other words, in order to “loan” you $300,000, the bank has to have on deposit $30,000 of other people’s money. The other $270,000 dollars exists only as a kind of fiction, in a computer system. In other words, by making the loan, the bank has created $270,000 dollars OUT OF THIN AIR. That money takes the form of a promissory note from you to the bank and a notation in a computer database. The promissory note states that you will work for 30 years, turning your labor into money to pay the bank back, at interest, for the money that it didn’t have that it “loaned” to you to buy your house. In other words, you become a debt slave to bank. The house remains in the bank’s name, and the first time you are late with a payment, it will initiate proceedings to take it from you, which the state will vigorously assist with, using armed police officers. And that interest? Interest rates vary all over the place over time. In my life, I have seen average home rates as high as 17 percent and as low as 4 percent. But let’s assume that the rate is an average one, over time, of 8 percent and that the mortgage is over 30 years. In that time, you will pay the bank $792,464.40—over three quarters of a million dollars—just shy of half a million dollars more than the non-existent 300,000 that the bank “loaned” to you. The bank gives up nothing of its own, and gets, in turn, three quarters of a million dollars’ worth of your labor. What a beautiful scam, if you happen to be one of the wealthy people who owns part of a bank, and the very wealthy almost all do, in the form of bonds and shares.
24.6 That system I just explained is called “fractional reserve banking.” It’s our current economic/social/political system, and it’s designed to make rich people richer by appropriating lifetimes of labor from everyone else while giving them nothing, in reality, except permission to become endebted wage slaves. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way. That system was created, fairly recently, by people, and it can be uncreated. Many years ago, an uncle of mine fought in Korea. While he was doing that, he saved his meagre Army pay, and when he got back home with the wife he’d met on a layover in the Philippines, he bought a bunch of lumber. Then, his friends and relatives turned out and, in the course of a few weeks, used that lumber to build him a house on a piece of my grandfather’s farm. And by doing that, he purchased 30 years of NOT being an endebted wage slave and NOT risking having a banker take his home from him.
24.7 So, our couple buys their house. Then they have to work really, really hard to buy lots and lots of stuff to put in that house. And they have very little time, of course, between trying to raise their kids and working to pay the bank back for the money (that it didn’t have) that it “loaned” to them, for anything else. They have no time for personal development, for school, for friends, for their families living scattered to the winds, wherever the job happens to be. The couple gets married and POOF, they disappear. Their old friends who came to their wedding see them less and less and less until they just don’t see them at all. Each member of the couple gives up almost all freedom to act independently. Occasionally, they have another couple or some relatives over to dinner. That is, they “socialize.” Think of that. For almost all of human history, that term would have made no sense at all because people were always doing stuff with other people. Now, it’s this thing that people do, a few times a year, for a few hours each time. Experiences with other people, outside the couple, are reduced in quality and duration to “catching up” over lunch or on the telephone. Mostly, they stay at home and, over a few decades, go increasingly, quietly crazy. In the U.S., today, over 60 percent of marriages end in divorce. People still think that the nuclear family is the usual situation in the United States. It’s not. MOST U.S. households now don’t look anything like that. They are mostly divorced parents with kids and younger or older single people living alone or with roommates. So unsustainable is that isolated nuclear family thing in the long-term that today, only 19 percent of American households are nuclear families, even though people still, weirdly, THINK of the isolated nuclear family in the suburbs—that recent historical aberration—as typical, desirable, and normal. It’s not. People are not and historically have not been built to live like that. Most, trying to do that, go some variety of nuts.
25.8 Young couples in Europe have pretty much figured this out by now. Most, now, are not getting state sanction of their relationships. They have relationships, some of them long-term, but they’ve wised up to what an insane, isolated, crazy-making thing the isolated suburban nuclear family is. Another sign: increasingly, young people are waiting until they get quite a bit older to get married, for they are rightfully cautious about committing themselves to an isolated nuclear family cell for the rest of their lives. Yet another: many young people are taking this matter in hand and forming what are now known as intentional communities—groups of friends who live side by side and share resources. They think of this as some sort of far-out, freaky experimentation, but it’s actually how people have mostly lived for mostly forever. It’s the isolated nuclear family in the suburbs that is the historical aberration. And an aberration it is.
–From my unpublished book Notes to Krystalina
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Thoreau speaks somewhere in Walden or elsewhere of his neighbors carrying their houses on their backs. LOL.
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“How difficult it is to be simple! -Jung
“Simplify, simplify, simplify!” – Thoreau
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How big of him!
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Miles with Miles
Whose schools these are, I think I know,
but Mikey doesn’t think them so.
He thinks they’re his, so all will weep;
they’ve miles to go beneath this creep.
The children of Houston will find it queer,
attending schools so void of cheer.
where all that counts toward “being best”
is scores they get on bullet tests.
And when his policies all are a bust
and the teachers’ spirits all totally crushed,
some other school system he’ll find to derail
because deformers upward fail.
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OK. The meter needed a little work
Miles with Miles
Whose schools these are, I think I know,
but Mikey doesn’t think them so.
He thinks they’re his, so all will weep;
they’ve miles to go beneath this creep.
Houston’s kids will find it queer,
attending schools devoid of cheer.
where all that counts toward “being best”
is scores they get on bullet tests.
And when his plans have all gone bust.
all joy and teachers’ spirits crushed,
some other schools he’ll go derail
because deformers upward fail.
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That’s a good one!
No parental rights in Houston.
No elected school board.
No democracy.
State even took away local management of elections.
Remember when Republicans believed in local control?
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They only believed in local control by rich white men.
So, a meme that’s going around: I’ll be voting for the party that wants to give fourth graders free lunches, not for the one that wants to force them to give birth.
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On this issue of local control, the very concept of state versus local control is currently the subject of a huge power struggle in Texas:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/not-worth-the-paper-it-s-printed-on-texas-republicans-ignore-ruling-against-abbott-s-death-star/ar-AA1g3ttT?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=e34fb1003cf440c7907a9ad891fb7b98&ei=15
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Bob: you cleaned it up nicely.
Diane: has there ever been a day when Republicans actually wanted local control?
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Roy, I would say yes, there was. Except when it came to military spending. And with a caveat on who, locally, would hold the power: wealthy, white, Christian men.
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Republicans wanted local control to thwart desegregation. They wanted local control because they were in charge.
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Diane and Bob: you have confirmed what I thought. Lincoln’s Republicans wanted local control because the fugitive slave act compelled them to round up fugitive slaves. A generation later, Republicans wanted local control because it allowed company owners to hire armies to attack striking workers. Then there was the southern strategy, local control to reverse desegregation.
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It all depends who holds the power at local, state, and national levels, doesn’t it? Where you stand depends on where you sit.
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Here we go again…THEY tried that in our school district, “More time for testing!” It was odd to see the little kids (I taught right across the lawn from my son’s elementary school) and for a long while the little ones did not come out for recess. Fortunately, the school district was audited by the state and wah-lah recess returned. I know, I know…”when I was a kid” we had plenty of recess where we played basketball, jump rope, and paper football. Yes! Kids lined up on the blacktop and slide their paper footballs till they were shredded. As an adult and while in college I used to run for a few miles to solve problems; it freed up my mind to go to work. And, when I taught my final years at the middle school, the kids did absolutely nothing. And…yes, I don’t remember ever having a real lunch (my wife gets an hour) EVER. Fun stuff. FREE THE CHILDREN.
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“FREE THE CHILDREN.”
Bingo bango boingo! We have winner! Give that nice man a Kewpie Doll!!
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Mike Miles reminds me of officers in combat that get fragged in their tent or shot in the back by their own troops.
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Ah, yes. Some 20 years after the fact, I can still hear former Atlanta Superintendent Dr. Benjamin Canada speaking while backed by a school board that had caught the then-new “school reform” disease: “Those kids don’t need to be out there hanging from monkey bars!”
And so began the end for playgrounds and recess. (Playgrounds were restored beginning c. 2017.)
To my knowledge, Canada wasn’t military. So, maybe the problem with Mike Miles is Mike Miles sans military.
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People like Miles are usually trying to command “respect” through force that they cant get through persuasion.
Only what they command is not real respect but fear.
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But apparently some parents are not afraid of him — so he has already failed.
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He may as well quit now because once they lose the fear of you, the war is lost.
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His firing of the two principals early on was an example of a tactic to instill fear in those under his command.
But he is obviously already losing control of the situation.
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Mike Miles is getting national attention, esp for his decision to turn libraries into detention centers.
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Miles wants to ruin the Houston schools. He knows he is doing wrong.
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I’m surprised a military man would listen to parents.
Some irate mom(s) must really have given him an earful.
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Like most Broadies, Miles doesn’t know a thing about how children learn or what motivates inquiry. The fact that too many haven’t learned a thing after the anti-recess era says it all.
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